Containers

Containers are application-centric methods to deliver high-performing, scalable applications on any infrastructure of your choice. Containers are best suited to deliver microservices by providing portable, isolated virtual environments for applications to run without interference from other running applications.

Microservices are lightweight applications written in various modern programming languages, with specific dependencies, libraries, and environmental requirements. It is packaged together with its dependencies.

Containers encapsulate microservices and their dependencies but do not run them directly.

Containers run container images.

A container image bundles the application along with its runtime and dependencies, and a container is deployed from the container image offering an isolated executable environment for the application. Containers can be deployed from a specific image on many platforms, such as workstations, VMs, public cloud, etc.

Container orchestrators are tools which group systems together to form clusters where containers' deployment and management is automated at scale while meeting the requirements mentioned above. 

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

• Azure Container Instances

• Azure Service Fabric

• Kubernetes

• Docker Swarm

• Marathon

• Nomad

Most container orchestrators can be deployed on the infrastructure of our choice - on bare metal, VMs, on-premise, or the public cloud. There are turnkey solutions which allow Kubernetes clusters to be installed, with only a few commands, on top of cloud IaaS such as: 

• GCE, AWS EC2 

• Docker Enterprise 

• IBM Cloud, etc.

There are managed container orchestration-as-a-Service offerings, more specifically Kubernetes as-a-Service, offered and hosted by major cloud providers: 

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) 

• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS)

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

• IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

• Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes